Turns out having a daily blog is hard if you’ve never done it before (who would have thought), so these entries are taking a while to finish and publish. I’m still taking notes from every day, so they will be up eventually, but I’m not sure I’ll manage to do all of them whilst still in Japan

For breakfast this day we went down to the same restaurant in the lobby that we ate at the day prior. For some reason all of us had woken up at 3am during the night (even though we all went to bed at varying times). We figure it must have something to do with being jetlagged, but who knows. The breakfast was a buffet with everything from bacon, sausages and scrambled eggs to Miso soup, noodles, Wagyu beef and even chicken nuggets (maybe because it was Christmas? Who knows).

A very non-standard breakfast

The plan for the day was to visit the Meiji Jingu shrine and then go to Shibuya. We walked all the way to the shrine from our hotel, getting to see more of the streets of Tokyo on the way. Since the way to the shrine was past Shinjuku station, this also gave me the opportunity to get my Suica card as well as take out some money. Since I am the only one in the family with an android phone I knew I’d have to get a card, but for some reason the NFC on brother’s phone doesn’t function properly, so he had to get one as well, whilst both mum and dad had digital cards on their phones instead. A lot of the companies who own technology that’s used for a majority of the card readers in Japan have exclusive deals with apple, and thus android phones can’t do things like a digital Suica card, thus the need for physical ones. In the end both me and my brother got Welcome Suica cards, a special version for visitors that you wouldn’t need to return, and thus didn’t have a deposit. They also had a really nice design on them!

The Shrine

There’s something so regal about these gates.

The next stop for the day was the Meiji Jingu shrine, and the gardens that surround it. We got there no problem at all, and whilst we were reading the displays just outside the tori gate into the garden, we met another Swede who said he was surprised to see other Swedes.

The gardens were beautiful, and there was so much birdsong I started wondering if it was pre-recorded and just played back to make the garden seem like a more lively place. In any case, the gardens and the woods very incredibly beautiful, and very luscious for being in the end of December. There was greenery everywhere as we walked up towards the main temple. Once we got up we washed off at a cleansing station, and then we were into into the main complex. The shrine was very pretty, and there were several things to see inside the main area. There were two sacred trees who had been married where people would pray for their relationships, there was of course the main shrine, and there was also a prayer wall where you could leave prayers for the monks to put up!

Love when nature is incorporated into stuff like this

After looking around for a while we continued onwards, finding two large walls of holy drinks, one of sake and one of wine, that had been gifted to the temple throughout the years. As we were walking towards them I made a joke about it being “the holy spirits”, and you must then imagine my surprise when I realised that it in fact was holy sine and sake.

holy spirits!

Towards Shibuya

Our next stop on our journey was Shibuya, and the scramble crossing. It was a relatively short 30 minute walk there from the shrine, and we went through plenty of mutli-directional crossings on the way. It’s a really neat concept to allow all the pedestrians to walk at the same time and just sort it out so they don’t collide with each other. I’ve gotten good experience with this already from a “dance” at my Uni which involves standing in two long lines on opposite sides of an area and then running towards and through each other, and then back again and then to the first side, and so on (those of you who know about “the storm” have probably experienced this already). The crossings of Tokyo are slightly less chaotic, and given the lower speeds everyone is travelling at, quite a lot safer too.

making my way downtown

We eventually make it to the Scramble crossing, and it was indeed quite impressive in real life. It’s enormous, and there are tourists absolutely everywhere filming as they cross the street. We crossed over to the station, and had a quick look at everything. Most of my prior knowledge of Tokyo’s layout comes from videogames, mostly Persona 5 and The World Ends With You (TWEWY) (both amazing games that you should most certainly try if given a chance. TWENY is hands down the best game ever made for the Nintendo DS). This comes with the caveat of things not being quite the way I know them in real life (since games have to take some creative liberties and things change as time passes). Shibyua crossing is almost exactly the same as in TWENY, with the 409 building off to the side. The big change from what I knew was the giant IKEA sign just straight ahead, but in my mind that was a very welcome addition!

just like the simulations

We went to a small cafe nearby to plan our next course of action, and it was decided that we were going shopping. There was a giant shopping centre just across the street from where we had our fika, one that seems to be a giant chain in Japan, Don Quijote. There was a horrible high pitched tone as we walked through the main door, but neither mum nor dad seemed to be able to hear it. This store seemed to have absolutely everything. I unfortunately didn’t take a lot of pictures (something I tired to amend in the next few days), but just trust me when I say it had everything from clothing to healthcare to shopping to makeup to travel items. Practically any item you could want they probably had. We spent a good while in there (I even managed to snag some late christmas presents for some friends), and then eventually we decided to go home, by metro! We went back to the scramble crossing again, and made sure to go by the Hachiko statue, a statue of a dog who waited patiently at the station every day after his owner passed away whilst being at work one day.

who’s a good boy??

Heading Back Home

Then it was time for our first ride on the metro! we went through it with pretty much no issues at all. The only casualty being dad’s head, which he hit whilst standing up from his seat (a seat he unfortunately only had for one station as the metro we went on was quite packed). It’s incredibly nice that they tell you what door is opening on the next station, as it allows you to prepare for getting out a lot better!

Once we got back to Shinjuku we decided to go get something to eat straight away, and so after a quick pitstop back at the hotel to put away our things, we wondered through an area with a large amount of Korean restaurants and food stores. At first we wanted to find a Japanese place since we are in Japan after all, but after only getting Korean place after Korean place we eventually decided to just go for the next one. We walked in, took a look at the menu and decided it looked great.

god there was so much food

the face of regret

We looked through the menu, and eventually placed our order. As we were telling the waiter what we wanted I started realising we were getting slightly larger than I had originally thought, but I figured we’d be fine. That’s when I also came to the conclusion that I wasn’t even that hungry. We were screwed. Even as this horrible fact set in me and dad were determined to get as much eaten as possible, and eat we did. As we were going through the food we decided that we most certainly could not eat any rice after having all the rest of the food, so we called over the waiter, typed out “We’re very sorry but could you please cancel the fried rice” on google translate and showed it to him, which worked great! Later at the hotel whilst looking into it more it turns out that we may have been one step too formal and ended up saying “we are deeply and terribly sorry” but eh, it can never hurt to be too polite.

We didn’t have anything to drink, so I ordered a green tea from the drink menu (we also had to order something in order to get a deal on the massive amount of meat we got), and when it arrived I quickly found out that green tea with sake was a thing. It was quite tasty, certainly a surprise, but a decently welcome one. Later on I also tried a ginger ale which was incredibly good, and really tasted of ginger. I know several people back in Sweden who would absolutely love it.

all done

In the end we managed to eat almost all of the food (except for one thing that dad said didn’t taste very good) and walk all the way home without dying in the process! I was planning to write out a full entry on the blog that evening, but I ended up just falling asleep instead (I’ve very quickly found out that writing these take quite a lot of time, but I’m commited to finish writing all of them before the trip ends! If nothing else there will be a lot of writing on the plane ride home).

Today’s Japanese phrases:

Okaikei onegaishimasu - (Could we have the Check please)